MIDDLE EAST: It is impossible to be wholly objective in this conflict, writes Elaine Lafferty from the West Bank
It was happening again, in the order that it always happens. A phone call . . . yes, there's been a bomb, it was near here, the wounded are being brought in. No, there is no count yet on how many dead. Prepare the emergency room, clear the hallways for gurneys. Also, importantly, make sure there are enough chairs in the ER waiting area, and in the waiting area for surgery.
Because families will soon descend on this hospital. They will wait to learn the conditions of their relatives. They will wait to find their relatives .
They will wait to learn if their sons or daughters are alive.
Dr Zvi Ben-Ishai, deputy director of the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, sits in his small office in the basement surrounded by books of proverbs and poetry, some in Hebrew, some in Arabic.
He exudes the calm of a weary man whose agitation and anger has long drained away. Just upstairs, the hospitals' emergency operating rooms are filled with patients undergoing surgery from the morning's latest suicide bombing, this one on a bus less than three miles away.
"This is the front," he says. "The front of this war is not anywhere else, it is here. But we are not treating soldiers. We are treating children, we are treating mothers, people on their way to work. We live in the Middle East.This is how we live."
Dr Ben-Ishai dutifully informs us about how many people have been admitted today. He describes their injuries carefully but also routinely, so as to explain to the uninitiated that the devastation caused by these Palestinian suicide bombers is always similar. They use screws and nails embedded in the pipe bombs attached to the so-called "suicide belts" around their waists.
Aside from the "blast injuries", the blunt trauma caused by the force of an explosion in an enclosed space, the bodies of those passengers on the bus are filled with nails embedded in their skin, their organs. But Dr Ben-Ishai cannot confine himself to medical talk, and he frequently forays into politics, cautioning that these are not "official" views, merely his own.
"I remember after September 11th Mr Bush crying out for the elimination of terrorists. Now I don't understand where is his backbone?" In his view, America does not support Israel enough.
I ask him if he agrees with the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and his policies of incursion and seemingly random occupation of various West Bank Palestinian cities. I ask him if it worries him that Palestinian civilians seem to be at the mercy of an extremely aggressive Israeli military.
"There is an Arabic proverb," he says. "'What is sweeter than halvah [a dessert\]? It is the peace after the animosity.' We want peace, but we have no partner in peace in Arafat. This hospital is a microcosm of Israel. Twenty per cent of our staff are Arabs. They care for Jewish wounded. Our Jewish staff care for Arabs."
Dr Ben-Ishai suddenly looks wearier than before. He sighs before struggling to answer the question.
"We might forgive the Arabs for bombing and shooting us. But you ask what I cannot forgive them for? I cannot forgive them for making us act this way, for using rifles, for killing this way. I cannot forgive that."
It is an interesting question. Has Israel been forced to, as the hospital administrator says, "act this way"? And how exactly is Israel acting? It is a truism held and shared by many journalists that once you spend time in the Middle East, particularly Israel, you can never be entirely objective again. The might of the Israeli military complex against the poor, powerless, rock-throwing Palestinians seems theatrically unequal. I know reporters who will only patronise Palestinian hotels and restaurants in an effort to put money in needier pockets.
I never thought it that simple. And with some Russian Jewish relatives in my distant genetic woodpile, I also thought many reporters failed to understand the real fears that haunt Israel about its survival.
After two weeks there, I cannot say I have been able to maintain such a view.
The "behaviour" of Israel can be considered in two contexts; the policies of its government, which might and perhaps should be considered separately from the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary people.
In both contexts unfortunately, one witnesses a consistent pattern of ethnic hatred, provocation and methodical humiliation.
Jamal, a Palestinian taxi driver, told us one day how he had been strip-searched earlier by police at Ben Gurion airport while rushing to pick up a passenger.
"My body was still warm from my shower. They made me take off my shirt and drop my pants, right there outside the airport," he said.
Outside the city of Jenin, we saw 14 Palestinian prisoners, blindfolded and hands bound, kneeling, by the side of the road, under the guns of Israeli soldiers. They were still there hours later, in the same painful position.
In Jenin, we spoke with the Red Cross, who had been practically begging the Israeli authorities to allow them to move ambulances in to rescue women and children dying in the rubble of destroyed homes. They were refused.
In Rumane, we met men who had been captured and released, who had been obviously beaten, with clear marks of cigarette burns on their necks.
IN the house-to-house searches in occupied West Bank towns, Israeli soldiers have looted and stolen money and jewellery from civilians, according to reports received by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance, although such reports are impossible to verify, especially as many Palestinians are afraid to use their names in reporting crimes.
One man, however, Mahmoud Abdullah, wasn't. He told Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian reporter, that Israeli soldiers used explosives to blow up the safe in his Ramallah supermarket and stole $18,000 in cash.
Not a day went by in the last two weeks - this is no exaggeration - when there was not word in the bar at the American Colony hotel, where many journalists congregate, that a clearly identified journalist had not been shot at, physically threatened, or arrested by the Israeli soldiers.
Ms Nolen, already displaying her Canadian passport, had a rifle pressed against her temple in Nablus, even when she had been allowed to enter the city.
Hilary McKenzie, another Canadian reporter, was actually fired upon. I myself was among a group of reporters detained for no reason for an hour and then sent off to our cars with no explanation.
The Israeli soldiers, like many civilians, seem not to believe the press should be allowed to report what is going on in Israel. The apartheid that is Israel today is just going to become more entrenched.
Israel is unrolling truckloads of barbed wire for a fence around the West bank, a $100 million buffer zone that will consist of ditches and observation posts and security patrols to essentially imprison Palestinians.
It is almost laughable to think this will work, that it will stem suicide bombings, that it will do anything other than inflame the passions and agony of a people who already feel they have nothing to live for.
When leaving this week, I was questioned for 35 minutes by Israeli security at the airport, a standard procedure for journalists. I was asked to provide the names and phone numbers of any Palestinians I had met, along with names and phone numbers for any journalists I had associated with. I declined.
I was asked where my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born. I was asked why I didn't speak Hebrew if I had a Jewish relative. I was asked why I work for The Irish Times if I was born in the US.
I stood there and thought of the Israeli, Dr Zvi Ben-Ishai, and his anger at the Arabs for making Israel "act like this."
Perhaps one day soon, as a citizen and a voter, he will also feel a responsibility to make Israel stop acting like this.